A femtocell may be a small, wireless communication service area that is managed and controlled by a femtocell base station. The femtocell base station is designed to connect user equipment located in the femtocell to a service provider's network. The femtocell may be a home or a small business office present in a cellular system. The range of femtocell base station may be about 10 to 30 meters. The femtocell base station may allow access for about 4 to 7 user equipment devices simultaneously.
Femtocell base stations may frequently be installed at a shadow area in a macrocell. The shadow area of the macrocell denotes an area where signals of the macrocell base station become deteriorated. For example, the shadow area of the macrocell may be an inside of a building or a home. Femtocell base stations may improve overall quality of mobile communication service by providing service within these shadow areas.
As described above, femtocells may frequently overlap areas of and within a macrocell in one area. In order to efficiently manage such a heterogeneous network including femtocells and macrocells, femtocell quality and macrocell quality may be regularly measured and monitored. The femtocell quality may denote quality of a signal transmitted from a femtocell base station that is received at a device transceiver. The macrocell quality may denote quality of a signal generated and transmitted from a macrocell base station as received by user devices. The femtocell quality and the macrocell quality may be measured by measuring signal quality parameters of both a femtocell and a macrocell. For example, the signal quality parameters may be a signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR) and/or a reference signal received power (RSRP). The SINR and/or RSRP femtocells and macrocells may be regularly measured and the femtocell quality and the macrocell quality may be determined based on the measurement results.
Typically, macrocell quality is measured separately from measuring femtocell quality. For example, two separated servers may be used for measuring the signal quality parameters for a macrocell and a femtocell independently. Accordingly, it may require a high cost for managing such heterogeneous network including femtocells and macrocells.